Cloud Daddy's Secure Backup offers five levels of protection. The new company has jumped into a growing and necessary market of AWS data backup, recovery and security.

A recently launched startup hopes it can be a protective father to Amazon Web Services data.

Cloud Daddy, with its Secure Backup product, provides data protection, security and infrastructure management. Those three elements "go hand in hand," said Joe Merces, founder and CEO of Cloud Daddy.

"Backup is not enough," Merces said.

While organizations are migrating more workloads to the AWS cloud, many don't understand Amazon's shared responsibility model and limited data protection and security.

"You have to have those backups," said Edwin Yuen, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

AWS hasn't been pushing backup as much as its public cloud rivals Microsoft Azure (with its own services) and Google Cloud Platform (through partners), Yuen said.

"They've left that to the market itself," Yuen said of AWS, so he understands why Cloud Daddy is focusing there.

Tackling a 'burgeoning market'

Cloud Daddy is AWS native and uses the public cloud provider's APIs. The product backs up volumes, instances and databases. The dashboard enables users to manage all of their AWS infrastructure.

Joe Merces

Though Cloud Daddy uses its own technology for the data protection, it backs up the data within AWS, from one region to another. Merces said Cloud Daddy is seeking to improve its data protection by providing its own cloud but did not give a timeframe.

Backup and disaster recovery features include application and crash-consistent backups based on the native Amazon snapshot API. Cross-region and cross-account backup and restore allows users to copy snapshots across multiple AWS regions and accounts.

Yuen said he would like to see more on-premises integration, as he believes a hybrid data protection platform is still in the future. He's also interested in the AI element that Cloud Daddy has said it would add, as it could provide insights into ransomware and other possible security issues.

"It's about working a little bit smarter," Yuen said, not just in data protection, but across the board.

In the last year, several data protection vendors have added security features in their products specifically to protect against ransomware. The ability to select an instance and use a firewall to protect it helps with ransomware protection, Merces said. In addition, the Cloud Daddy dashboard provides a quick glimpse of instances and which ones are publicly facing and protected.

High-profile ransomware attacks continue to hit. The city of Atlanta, for example, following an attack in March, took days to restore mission-critical services and spent about $5 million on the recovery effort. The city wouldn't have had a problem if it had a product like Cloud Daddy Secure Backup, as it would have been able to recover quickly, Merces said.

The emphasis on security within AWS protection is a good move, Yuen said.

"The market for AWS [data protection] is a burgeoning market," he said.

The fine print and the future

Cloud Daddy, based in Princeton, N.J., began in May 2017 and launched its product in June 2018. It is privately held and funded. Merces did not provide details on the company's seed funding. The company has 22 employees.

Cloud Daddy looks to have two major competitors in the AWS data protection market -- N2WS, which is now a Veeam company, and CloudRanger, which Druva recently acquired.

There are five levels of Cloud Daddy's Secure Backup, which is now available in the AWS Marketplace. These levels include the following:

A free option protects up to five AWS instances.

The basic version costs $129 per month and protects up to 20 instances.

An SMB option costs $299 per month and protects up to 50 instances.

The enterprise edition costs $749 per month and protects up to 200 instances.

The custom/managed service provider product is geared toward protecting more than 200 instances and costs $3.50 per instance.

"We don't have an issue customizing the solution," Merces said. "We're pretty nimble from a development point of view."

Yuen said he thinks the free version, with its limited scale but full functionality, might work well for a company looking to test the product, rather than try to use it for the long term. Cloud Daddy's sweet spot could lie in that custom edition, which scales quite high, Yuen said.

Merces said he expects Cloud Daddy to add disaster recovery orchestration in the 1.2 edition, due out at the end of August. A 1.1 update is due at the end of July.

Cloud Daddy is planning on incorporating AI and machine learning, applying those technologies toward quarantining and protecting backup, in its 2.0 update slated for October.

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